The night wasn’t enough to soothe Lila. On Monday she got up in a worse mood than when she had gone to bed. It’s the absence of her husband, Nunzia said apologetically, but neither Pinuccia nor I believed it. I soon discovered that she was angry mainly at me. On the road to the beach she made me carry her bag, and once we were at the beach she sent me back twice, first to get her a scarf, then because she needed some nail scissors. When I gave signs of protest she nearly reminded me of the money she was giving me. She stopped in time, but not so that I didn’t understand: it was like when someone is about to hit you and then doesn’t.
It was a very hot day; we stayed in the water. Lila practiced hard to keep afloat, and made me stand next to her so that I could hold her up if necessary. Yet her spitefulness continued. She kept reproaching me, she said that it was stupid to trust me: I didn’t even know how to swim, how could I teach her. She missed Sarratore’s talents as an instructor, she made me swear that the next day we would go back to the Maronti. Still, by trial and error, she made a lot of progress. She learned every movement instantly. Thanks to that ability she had learned to make shoes, to dexterously slice salami and provolone, to cheat on the weight. She was born like that, she could have learned the art of engraving merely by studying the gestures of a goldsmith, and then been able to work the gold better than he. Already she had stopped gasping for breath, and was forcing composure on every motion: it was as if she were drawing her body on the transparent surface of the sea. Long, slender arms and legs hit the water in a tranquil rhythm, without raising foam like Nino, without the ostentatious tension of Sarratore the father.
“Is this right?”
“Yes.”
It was true. In a few hours she could swim better than I could, not to mention Pinuccia, and already she was making fun of our clumsiness.
That bullying air dissipated abruptly when, around four in the afternoon, Nino, who was very tall, and Bruno, who came up to his shoulders, appeared on the beach, just as a cool wind rose, taking away the desire to swim.
Pinuccia was the first to make them out as they advanced along the shore, among the children playing with shovels and pails. She burst out laughing in surprise and said: Look who’s coming, the long and the short of it. Nino and his friend, towels over their shoulder, cigarettes and lighters, advanced deliberately, looking for us among the bathers.
I had a sudden sense of power, I shouted, I waved to signal our presence. So Nino had kept his promise. So he had felt, already, the next day, the need to see me again. So he had come purposely from Forio, dragging along his mute companion, and since he had nothing in common with Lila and Pinuccia, it was obvious that he had taken that walk just for me, who alone was not married, or even engaged. I felt happy, and the more my happiness seemed justified — Nino spread his towel next to me, he sat down, he pointed to an edge of the blue fabric, and I, who was the only one sitting on the sand, quickly moved over — the more cordial and talkative I became.
Lila and Pinuccia instead were silent. They stopped teasing me, they stopped squabbling with each other; they listened to Nino as he told funny stories about how he and his friend had organized their life of study.
It was a while before Pinuccia ventured a few words, in a mixture of dialect and Italian. She said the water was nice and warm, that the man who sold fresh coconut hadn’t come by yet, that she had a great desire for some. But Nino paid little attention, absorbed in his witty stories, and it was Bruno, more attentive, who felt it his duty not to ignore what a pregnant woman was saying: worried that the child might be born with a craving for coconut, he offered to go in search of some. Pinuccia liked his voice, choked by shyness but kind, the voice of a person who doesn’t want to hurt anyone, and she eagerly began chatting with him, in a low voice, as if not to disturb.
Lila, however, remained silent. She took little interest in the platitudes that Pinuccia and Bruno were exchanging, but she didn’t miss a word of what Nino and I were saying. That attention made me uneasy, and a few times I said I would be glad to take a walk to the fumaroles, hoping that Nino would say: let’s go. But he had just begun to talk about the construction chaos on Ischia, so he agreed mechanically, then continued talking anyway. He dragged Bruno into it, maybe upset by the fact that he was talking to Pinuccia, and called on him as a witness to certain eyesores right next to his parents’ house. Nino had a great need to express himself, to summarize his reading, to give shape to what he had himself observed. It was his way of putting his thoughts in order — talk, talk, talk — but certainly, I thought, also a sign of solitude. I proudly felt that I was like him, with the same desire to give myself an educated identity, to impose it, to say: Here’s what I know, here’s what I’m going to be. But Nino didn’t leave me space to do it, even if occasionally, I have to say, I tried. I sat and listened to him, like the others, and when Pinuccia and Bruno exclaimed, “All right, we’re going for a walk now, we’re going to look for coconut,” I gazed insistently at Lila, hoping that she would go with her sister-in-law, leaving me and Nino finally alone to face each other, side by side, on the same towel. But she didn’t breathe, and when Pina realized that she was compelled to go for a walk by herself with a young man who was polite but nevertheless unknown, she asked me, in annoyance, “Lenù, come on, don’t you want to walk?” I answered, “Yes, but let us finish our conversation, then maybe we’ll join you.” And she, displeased, went with Bruno toward the fumaroles: they were exactly the same height.
We continued to talk about how Naples and Ischia and all Campania had ended up in the hands of the worst people, who acted like the best people. “Marauders,” Nino called them, his voice rising, “destroyers, bloodsuckers, people who steal suitcases of money and don’t pay taxes: builders, lawyers for builders, Camorrists, monarcho-fascists, and Christian Democrats who behave as if cement were mixed in Heaven, and God himself, with an enormous trowel, were throwing blocks of it on the hills, on the coasts.” But that the three of us were talking is an exaggeration. It was mainly he who talked, every so often I threw in some fact I had read in Cronache Meridionali. As for Lila, she spoke only once, and cautiously, when in the list of villains he included shopkeepers.
She asked, “Who are shopkeepers?”
Nino stopped in the middle of a sentence, looked at her in astonishment.
“Tradesmen.”
“And why do you call them shopkeepers?”
“That’s what they’re called.”
“My husband is a shopkeeper.”
“I didn’t mean to offend you.”
“I’m not offended.”
“Do you pay taxes?”
“I’ve never heard of them till now.”
“Really?”
“Yes.”
“Taxes are important for planning the economic life of a community.”
“If you say so. You remember Pasquale Peluso?”
“No.”
“He’s a construction worker. Without all that cement he would lose his job.”